The Protection of Civilians and ethics of humanitarian governance: beyond intervention and resilience.

Kristoffer Lidén

doi:10.1111/disa.12335

Abstract

The principle of the Protection of Civilians (PoC) in armed conflict has ethical repercussions in various actions undertaken by states and international organisations, from humanitarian relief, development aid, and peacekeeping, to warfare and military intervention. While the ethics of humanitarian intervention are instructive in this regard, most PoC practices should be conceived rather as modes of humanitarian governance across borders—from interventionist to resilience‐oriented kinds. The consequences of this for the ethics of PoC are explored in this paper, highlighting questions of power, culture, and complicity. By relating these questions to the ethical strands of solidarist and pluralist internationalism, it positions the ethics of PoC within the broader field of the ethics of world politics. Examples are drawn from recent scholarly debate on PoC efforts in war‐torn countries such as South Sudan. This analysis of the ethics of PoC reconfigures central positions in the debate on humanitarian intervention to an era of global humanitarian governance.

Highlights

Mamdani had been part of the African Union (AU) Commission of Inquiry on South Sudan, where he wrote his own ‘dissensus report’ (Mamdani, 2014). The gap between their views reflects a core problem of the United Nations (UN) agenda on the Protection of Civilians (PoC): extremely disparate views about its political potential and scope (Willmot et al, 2016). Mamdani takes as his point of departure the question of what would have been the correct political path to advance peace and protect civilians in South Sudan
Harmonising with this picture, the principle of PoC has been integrated into a broad array of international responses to armed conflict since its adoption by the UN Security Council in 1999: from peacekeeping missions, humanitarian relief efforts, and conflict mediation initiatives to continuous efforts at prosecuting the gravest violations of the principle in war-crimes tribunals and the International Criminal Court (ICC)
Reflecting this diversification of actors and agendas, Hugh Breakey distinguishes between four types of PoC: ‘combatant PoC’, regulating warfare; ‘humanitarian PoC’, responding to civilian suffering caused by armed conflict, including refugee management; ‘peacekeeping PoC’, introducing protection as a key aspect of peacekeeping mandates; and ‘Security Council PoC’, mandating responses

Summary

Introduction

‘You are totally off the mark’, Hilde F. Mamdani had been part of the African Union (AU) Commission of Inquiry on South Sudan, where he wrote his own ‘dissensus report’ (Mamdani, 2014) The gap between their views reflects a core problem of the UN agenda on the Protection of Civilians (PoC): extremely disparate views about its political potential and scope (Willmot et al, 2016). Were states seen as secondary to individuals as security concerns; states were complemented by civil-society organisations and private corporations as actors of a global governance apparatus for the achievement of UN objectives (CGG, 1995; UN, 2014; Weiss, 2013) Harmonising with this picture, the principle of PoC has been integrated into a broad array of international responses to armed conflict since its adoption by the UN Security Council in 1999: from peacekeeping missions, humanitarian relief efforts, and conflict mediation initiatives to continuous efforts at prosecuting the gravest violations of the principle in war-crimes tribunals and the International Criminal Court (ICC). The extent to which strategic calculations influence the normative positions of the veto powers indicates how the ethics of PoC contain a deeply political dimension

PoC and the ethics of world politics

The politics of humanitarian governance